


Notes on an Expurgated Genealogy

by Woldy



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Bisexual Character, Coming Out, Community: lgbtfest, Dysfunctional Family, HIV/AIDS, Multi, POV Alternating, Polyamory, Queer Themes, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-28
Updated: 2009-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-05 09:06:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Woldy/pseuds/Woldy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four members of the Black family who come out and one who doesn’t.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Notes on an Expurgated Genealogy

**Author's Note:**

> Written for lgbtfest with the prompt '100. The Five Worst Times and Places to Come Out'. With thanks to everyone who helped me to plan the fic &amp; to my fabulous betas [](http://nathaniel-hp.livejournal.com/profile)[**nathaniel_hp**](http://nathaniel-hp.livejournal.com/) &amp; [](http://magic-at-mungos.livejournal.com/profile)[**magic_at_mungos**](http://magic-at-mungos.livejournal.com/) . Readers unfamiliar with the intricacies of the Black family tree are recommended to consult it [ via the HP Lexicon](http://community.livejournal.com/lgbtfest/%E2%80%9Dhttp://www.hp-lexicon.org/images/blackfamilytrees/official-final-version.gif%E2%80%9D) . The oddities of Isla's grammar are deliberate, because she may open minded about sex, but she's a presciptivist about language.

**Isla Hitchens-Montagu, née Black**

Married a Muggle, indeed! I don’t regret being removed from the damned ancestral tapestry, but my family could have the decency not to lie about why they removed me. Marrying a Muggle wasn’t the cause of the arguments between my father and I, it was the consequence.

Don’t frown at me like that, dear, it gives one the most horrible lines on the forehead and you don’t want to spoil your pretty face. Take it from one who knows; I was a beauty myself once upon a time. Not by comparison to darling Kathleen, of course, but then she outshone every flower in the garden and star in the sky.

You’re still frowning, I see. Perhaps I had better start from the beginning.

It happened in the Christmas holidays of 1869, during my last year at Hogwarts. We were in the midst of a dinner party at the Yaxleys’ and had just finished the main course — fish was it? My memory’s going, I’m afraid — when Edrich tapped his wine glass for attention and said pompously, “I am honoured to announce that Isla and I are engaged.”

The words didn’t really sink in until I heard people congratulating us, but I came to myself when Edrich’s hand landed on my wrist.

“I beg your pardon,” I said, snatching my arm away, “but I have agreed to no such thing!”

“Isla,” my father growled, “don’t make a scene.”

“No, I refuse to be exchanged like a piece of chattel!” I said, pushing my chair back and getting to my feet. “I told you that there is an understanding between Kathleen and —”

“This is not a subject for debate over dinner!” my mother snapped.

I glanced around the table, taking in the heavy silverware, the crystal chandelier, and the staring silent faces lit by flickering candlelight.

“Fine!” I said, gripping my wand, and Apparated home.

My father arrived within seconds, and I was subjected to an endless barrage about duty and family honour. I didn’t listen to most of it — the content is tediously predictable — but I will never forget his threat: “We could have you institutionalised for that, Isla. I could obtain a certificate of insanity _tonight_.”

Locking me up wouldn’t have been a first for my family. People pointedly don’t talk about poor aunt Ethelberta, but it’s not hard to interpret those clumsy phrases about frailty. Throughout my childhood I saw the hissed intakes of breath and hasty change of subject if someone was foolhardy enough to mention her name. No, I don’t doubt that my father would have sent me to a mental institution in order to prevent Kathleen and I from _shaming_ the family.

I stared mutely at the carpet, nodded, agreed to apologise to the Yaxleys tomorrow — “Merlin knows if they’ll want to be associated with you now, you disgusting child” — and sent a Patronus to Kathleen the moment my father left.

Within two days I was engaged to Kathleen’s cousin Robert who, despite being a Muggle, was a gentlemen’s man and prepared to tolerate the magic in exchange for a discrete and convenient arrangement. I didn’t meet Robert in person until the first Hogsmeade weekend of spring, when he arrived wearing a ridiculous fur hat. He stopped wearing that horrible hat eventually, but it took the concerted efforts of Michael and I to persuade him. Do you know Robert’s dear friend Michael? I must introduce you, then, because he’s the sweetest man and has a wicked sense of humour.

Another thing that’s annoyed me for years is my family’s reference to Robert as ‘Bob Hitchens’, which is unwanted familiarity taken to the point of sheer condescension. For the record, his name is Robert Hitchens-Montagu, and since he is forty-third in line for the British throne I’ve always suspected that my mother abbreviated his name because she felt upstaged. Heaven forbid that their daughter should marry better on her own then they arranged for her, and to a Muggle no less!

No, I haven’t regretted my decision for a moment. The joy of being British is that what one does in one’s own home is nobody’s business, and besides there’s no legal prohibition against anything women do together beneath their petticoats. It was a wonderfully functional arrangement because the men would retire to one room with cigars and billiards and we had the rest of the evening to ourselves. It wasn’t unusual to find people scattered throughout the house in states of dishabille, and Kathleen stretched out on the chaise longue wearing nothing but a corset and cloud of wild-hair.

In the end Kathleen married a Frenchman and had two lovely boys, who went on to be rebels themselves with the Bloomsbury set. I don’t mind that she married him, and it never really disrupted things between us. Perhaps it’s best not to make these things too explicit because the English language isn’t really adequate, is it? I’d much prefer to be ignored than to be talked about in the wrong sort of way by the wrong sort of people. Dear Oscar believed the opposite, of course, but look where it got him.

No, there’s a wonderful freedom in privacy and we Victorians weren’t nearly as conservative as young people today seem to believe. So, that’s my story. I’ve wondered about publishing my memoirs of those years because I think that society’s better for a hint of scandal, but I dare say nobody would believe it.  


**Phineas Black, popularly known as ‘Pip’ **

Merlin only knows why my father named me after himself; I’m inclined to think it was sheer spite. He was the most unpopular headmaster that Hogwarts ever had, you know, and I think he was proud of it.

I’m not sure that I ever did ‘come out’ to my family in the way people mean it nowadays. Daniel and I were seen together in public, of course, but I’d known him for two years before my father disowned me for supporting the 1902 Muggle Rights Bill. It wasn’t a surprise because I could see the writing on the wall from the day I started at the Prophet, but the letter from his solicitor cited the Bill as the reason.

Nowadays the press is full of all sorts of gossip, but people were more circumspect about these things back then. Daniel and I lived in a flat off Diagon Alley, and there was never any nasty whispering within my earshot. Of course, the Prophet wasn’t going to attack their own journalists, and no other publication would dare to take on the community’s largest-circulation paper.

If my father hadn’t disowned me over Muggle rights, then I’m sure it would have been something else: votes for witches, goblin petitions, land claims by centaur herds. Not to mention that I single-handedly ruined his friend Othelwick Burke’s campaign to become Minister for Magic. All in all, I have to say that it was rather liberating to be disowned — almost a rite of passage.

When my father died I sent flowers from myself and Daniel, but my brother told me that I was unwelcome at the service or wake. Friends reported later that our flowers weren’t placed by his coffin, so perhaps there’s no reconciliation in my family — even in death.

My father, Phineas-Nigellus, did his best to control us all, children and students both, but I had the last word: I wrote his epitaph.  


**Cedrella Weasley, Née Black**

I’ve had my share of awkward moments, goodness knows, but that incident with my husband and Violet was...uniquely memorable. We had plenty of good nights together before that, you understand, so the problem wasn’t the company. If poor Sept hadn’t fallen off the bed at an inopportune moment and injured an intimate part of his anatomy, then I’m sure it would have been a lovely evening.

I know what you’re thinking, ‘nothing a quick healing charm couldn’t fix,’ and I agree! But there’s no reasoning with men about their _parts_, and Sept refused pointblank to let either of us go near him with a wand. In the end we bundled him up in a dressing gown and took him to St Mungo's.

You haven’t really experienced embarrassment until you’ve Apparated to hospital in the middle of the night, wearing your nightclothes, accompanied by an ashen-faced husband and a friend who’s married to someone else. In retrospect, we could have saved ourselves a lot of troublesome gossip if we’d left Vi behind, but naturally she wanted to be sure that he was all right.

The greeting nurse looked surprised at our appearance, but that was nothing compared to the Healer’s reaction.

“It was rather crowded — you really can’t fit three people into a double bed, you know - and Sept slipped -”

“It’s the sort of accident which could happen to anybody, I’m sure —”

“— the angle was a bit awkward and I’m afraid that he’s damaged —”

“One at a time,” said the young Healer, who seemed to get more nervous by the minute. “If, um, Mr Weasley could, er, tell me what happened, that might be simplest.”

The Healer looked even more shocked after the explanation, but I think Sept was right to include all those details. As a lay-person, you never know what’s going to be medically relevant, do you?

Anyway, the young man did a few diagnostic charms, went bright red at whatever the results told him and then sent us home with a potion for Sept to take every eight hours.

“Don’t overexert yourself for the next few days. Perhaps your wife can look after you,” he said, glancing up from the clipboard. “Er, if you don’t mind me asking, which of you is Mrs Weasley?”

“She is,” Vi told him cheerfully, “but we’ll both be escorting him home.”

The healer’s eyes bulged a little and his voice squeaked as he said, “That’s, um, fine. You’re discharged and, er, good night.”

Violet smiled brightly at him and said, “Have a goodnight yourself, young man! It’s more fun with company.”

“Violet, that was cruel,” Sept chided as we left the room.

“Oh, balderdash,” Vi said with a grin, “at his age he should be getting some practical experience. It'd do him the world of good.”

In the end I threw out the wardrobe so that we could expand the bed, and after that there was no risk of anyone falling off it. Public opinion being what it was in the ‘50s, people talked about us for years, but we ignored them. I mean, it’s no one else’s business, is it? The Weasleys are known for their healthy sexual appetites, and Vi was there as much by my choice as Sept’s.

I’ve heard all sorts of rubbish about people like Violet and me being innately promiscuous, and I do worry that our hospital incident contributed to those rumours. I find that idea completely absurd; being attracted to more than one gender doesn’t make me less capable of being monogamous, and having lived in a monogamous marriage for a decade I ought to know. It’s our imaginations, not Violet’s gender, that drew us to an unorthodox bedroom arrangement.

If people need something to blame for my behaviour, then I suggest genetic heritage — after all, the Blacks have always been strong-minded, and some would say greedy. I just think that anyone who protests about our triad is jealous.  


**Alphard Black**

I laughed when I heard that Walburga had blasted me off the tree for helping Sirius out. I mean, come on! It’s not as though I haven’t done a thousand things she’s disapproved of over the years, and sending some Galleons to Sirius is the least of them.

The way I see it all the best people in my family have been taken off the tree: Cedrella Weasley is damn good fun, and great-uncle Phineas is a wonderful chap. I fired off an Owl to Phineas when I was fifteen and panicked about fancying Frank Hepplewhite, and he replied telling me to meet him in Hogsmeade the next weekend.

He looked so dapper and respectable in his Oxford brogues and tailored robe amidst all these scruffy schoolkids, then he bought me a double Firewhiskey and sat me down to sort my head out. I got the best advice of my life from Phineas, and being told which bars I should go to and what sort of men to avoid was the least of it. Seemed only right for me to do the same sort of favour for Sirius.

Now I know what you’re thinking and it wasn’t like that at all. Sirius isn’t queer — or wasn’t queer, how do you talk about someone in Azkaban? — as far as I can make out, so it was a different. It was clear that the kid needed reassurance from somebody, since his mother screeched at him like a harpy from his Sorting day onwards, and he looked miserable as sin whenever I saw him at family dinners. Not like his brother, who fit Walburga’s crazy expectations so perfectly that you could almost imagine she’d charmed him into doing it.

No, Sirius was the odd one out in that household, and the more Regulus did right the more his parents hated Sirius for failing them. Sirius was a good kid at heart and he didn’t deserve that. Looking back, I wish that I could have done more for him and kept him out of all this Death Eater business, but I wasn’t any kind of role model. I lived in a one-bedroom flat with my dungeon rig hanging from the ceiling, so it wasn’t like I could take him in.

It was the seventies, you know? The gay scene was exploding, becoming visible because people weren’t prepared to be bullied and silenced anymore, and I was fucking like it was going out of fashion. I think it was ’76 that Sirius left home, and virtually all I remember from that year was the parties in people’s flats, bathhouses, and once in a country house where we had an orgy in the swimming pool.

Those were the years when I was still with Hugo, the best top I ever knew, with a voice like Lou Reed meets the Head of the Aurors and a uniform to match. There wasn’t anything I didn’t try with Hugo and wasn’t much we didn’t enjoy, so I was high on pain, pills and pleasure for the best part of a decade.

You only live once and that sort of scene didn’t exist when I was in my twenties. This was the only chance that I was going to get, so I grabbed it with both hands and everything else fell by the wayside.

I do regret how Sirius ended up — maybe I could’ve done something about it, maybe I couldn’t — but that’s the only thing I regret. We’ve all got to die sometime and I had a good run, unlike some of the blokes in this ward. No surprises that Walburga hasn’t come to visit me because she always thought people were better off dead than being an embarrassment to her, and one day soon she’ll get her wish.

Hardly any families come to visit in the gay plague ward — yeah, I know what they call us — so we guys just have to support each other. That’s what great-uncle Phineas taught me and I’ve never forgotten it.  


** Regulus Black **

What I recall most vividly is the way his curtains were billowing wildly, the window flung open behind them. The room looked almost bare compared to the previous day: just his empty bed, the posters on the wall, and a few unwanted things scattered across the floor. All his Christmas presents were left there, every single one, as if he’d managed to find something politically unacceptable in the Quidditch gloves I gave him. Sirius was always viciously good at making a statement.

At first I didn’t see the note stuck to his bed, but it said nothing that wasn’t evident from the fact that he’d gone:

_Fuck your ideals and fuck you all._

Sirius

I still have that note somewhere, folded up amidst Christmas cards and family letters. I couldn’t bring myself to burn it, but I’ve certainly no desire to look at it. I’ve thought about that day a lot, because that was where all this started: Sirius went his way and I went mine. If he’s recognized me behind the mask during out clashes over the past months, then he’s given no sign of it.

I remember folding up the parchment and tucking it inside my robe before I went downstairs.

“He’s gone,” I said, and there was no doubt in either of their faces about what I meant.

“That little bastard,” said my mother, fingers clutching reflexively around her wand as if it were still possible to curse him blind or summon him back.

My father’s eyes fell on me. “Then you will be my heir,” he said quietly, with a seriousness that made me flinch. “The family heir must be someone I can rely on, a son who shares our loyalties and beliefs. You won’t let me down, will you, Regulus?”

I swallowed, looking down and clenching my hands into fists in the effort to stay calm.

It shouldn’t have been me. I was fifteen, for Merlin’s sake, and what right did Sirius have to walk away from everything? To condemn _me_ to having to live up to their standards, to have children with some woman I would never want to touch for the sake of continuing our bloodline. To force me to spend the rest of my life lying, so I’d never feel the press of a man’s body or stubble grazing my cheek without Obliviating him afterwards.

It was Sirius’ birthright, his _duty_, but one of us had to do it. When Sirius made his choice, he removed mine.

“Regulus?” my father said, his hand landing heavily on my shoulder. I could almost feel the weight of expectations from all my ancestors, all those years of power, carefully negotiated marriages and allegiances narrowing down to this.

I looked up. “You can rely on me, father,” I said, the childishness of my squeaky, uneven pitch incongruous with the adult responsibility I was accepting, “I won’t disappoint you.”


End file.
